Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Did you ever pick the wrong lady to diss

Did Defense Minister KoikeYuriko really set up Vice Minister MoriyaTakemasa--and a few others too--for a spectacular, humiliating fall?

Noooooo. It can't be. It is too good a story.

Here is the new version of the saga:

Moriya, who has let us say "a bit of an attitude problem," had a rather unfortunate habit of not answering his mobile phone at night when Minister Koike would call him, prefering to return her calls the next morning.

Sick of the lack of respect--and fully cognizant that not answering a Defense Minister's calls demonstrated a devastatingly stupid attitude toward the national security architecture--Koike determined that Moriya had to go, and soon.

Just how to arrange it was the question...and Amaterasu bless her, Koike came up with a doozy of way of delivering Moriya's comeuppance.

On the night before the story was to break, the Minister called Moriya, intending to tell him she had decided to fire him...and that the news of his dismissal would be in the papers the next day.

Just to give him a chance, she called him twice.

He did not take either call.

So Moriya learned of his dismissal not through "the proper channels"--which he likely could have stymied--but through his early morning perusing of the headlines.

He threw a snit, bringing in the big guns like Chief Cabinet Secretary ShiozakiYasuhisa to bear down upon Koike for her failure to follow the proper hiring and firing protocol. Which they did.

Creating the perfect moment for Koike to tell reporters today, "But I tried to tell Moriya beforehand. Twice. He just didn't take the call."

I apologize because this is only tangentially related to women, telephones and silly men.

It seems that phone numbers of the California office of JETRO and the Japanese consulate were listed in the DC Madam little black book.JETRO: 415-392-1333Japanese Consulate in San Fransisco: 415-777-3533Here's the list where you can find the matching numbers: http://cryptome.org/dc-madam-num.htm

Lobbying in Northern California...it is not all just wine, sushi and cash.

Unfortunately, the end result was probably another instance of MOFA and the GOJ wasting taxpayer yen. Democrats control both Sacramento and the California Congressional delegation, and it is almost impossible to buy a California Democrat (California Republicans, by contrast, are to corruption what children are to chocolate).

Former Speaker of the Assembly Jesse "Big Daddy" Unruh used to have a little orientation session for all the new Sacramento Democratic legislators before they took their oaths of office. In order to inculcate the proper attitude of a Democratic state lawmaker toward lobbyists and donors, he would gather them in his chambers and insist that they memorize The Rule:

"If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, f**k their women, and then come in here the next day and vote against them, you don't belong here."

Incidentally, ignorance of the importance of The Rule for California Democrats made it impossible for Komori Yasuhisa, Sakurai Yoshiko and their facilitators to comprehend the relationship between U.S. Representative Mike Honda and Chinese-American money. The ecstatic paranoids of the Japanese right looked at Honda's list of political contributors, looked at the comfort women resolution and said, "Aha!"

Only, there was no "Aha" there. Before becoming a U.S. Representative, Mike Honda was a California State Assemblyman. He knows The Rule. I would guess that when the lobbyists came by or called, he listened to their ideas, nodded his head his head sympathetically, then forgot all about them the moment they hung up or walked out the door.

In short, I think the presence of the Consulate/JETRO numbers in the DC Madam's little black book represents not the diplomats indulging themselves but a vain GOJ attempt to use sex to convince California lawmakers to vote a certain way.